| The subject of this study is Don DeLillo's representation of contemporary America in his later novels, specifically White Noise , Libra, Mao II, and Underworld . DeLillo's work catalogues the myriad shapes of American culture. His work consistently engages the task of mapping an increasingly dematerialized world order after World War II. For lack of a better term, I have decided to use the word "postmodern" to characterize the general features of that socio-cultural milieu. My first chapter investigates the changes the technology of reproduction brings about in the cultural formation and human identity as portrayed in White Noise. Chapter Two addresses the problematics of subjectivity and history in Libra. While the precarious tension between textuality and historicity makes the novel an ethically responsible postmodern fiction, its postmodern account of Lee Harvey Oswald tends to reduce a historical figure to a mechanical byproduct of the ambient apparatuses. The third chapter examines Mao II's ideological and imperialist unconscious manifested in its representation of the crowd, the novelist, and the terrorist. My last chapter deals with DeLillo's imagination of American history from 1951 to the early 1990s in his encyclopedic novel, Underworld. In the novel, history does not appear as a continuous, progressive flow of events, but as a mounting pile of waste best understood by Walter Benjamin's idea of "allegory."... |
